HP Lovecraft, Racism, and Educating James--New Video

A new webseries (?)

Zak and James attempt to discuss Lovecraft and racism, while also bringing up: Jordan Peele, Lovecraft Country, Kingdom Death, Alien, Jaws, nerdy introversion, Taxi Driver, James’ Lovecraft-movie picks, Blue Velvet, James’ fear of stuffed animals and the sea, turn-of-the-century WASP atheism, avant-garde fiction and band-aids, amateur press associations, PG Wodehouse, Bertrand Russell on romanticism and Hitler, deer are scary, a plot hole in Lost Boys, X-Men vs Dracula and more

A Clue Sandbox

I put together a horror adventure for the Demon City backers and I'm making it available to y'all if you want it.

It's a "clue sandbox", meaning that there's some trouble and clues and people to ask about the trouble in every direction. There are dozens of NPCs fleshed out, along with their daily movements around the city and their (every-shifting) connection to The Horror. The idea being: the PCs can start anywhere and find their way (by hundreds of possible routes) into solving the murder--or becoming the next victim.

It's for Demon City, of course, but it's not a mechanics-heavy adventure so would be pretty easy to run in any horror system.

So far I haven't had any complaints from the backers, so...if you want one, email me: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm. 20 Bucks.

The Quality of A Ritual

We all tend to like rituals, but when it comes to actually describing them in games we tend to choose one of two options:

-Verrrrry specific rituals that basically only end up getting used once for a specific effect, or
-Abstracted ideas about rituals like "Requires 800gp worth of materials" that are generally useful but lack flavor.

For Demon City, we tried to get a little deeper into how the systems of ritual worked. Here's Zedeck Siew with Corpse Oil rituals...

CORPSE OIL 
(a riff off Nam Man Prai, which is from the Thai phram (shamanic) folk tradition)

The act itself is relatively simple: chanting scripture, you hold a candle under the chin of a recently dead person. The air is rancid. Yellow, fatty fluid seeps from the crisping flesh.

Corpse oil has many uses. One chin yields a jam-jar-ful. Potency depends on provenance. If a corpse is:

- Beloved.
- A young woman.
- A virgin, until death.
- Your blood relation.
- Killed in grisly violence.
- Killed by your own hand.
- Properly buried and mourned.

Then each of the above conditions increases the quality and potency of the oil. In game terms each confers a “point” of Intensity.

~

Mixing in consecrated philtres, speaking the proper spells, a necromancer may prepare corpse oil in several ways.

As an ointment, on contact with skin, it can confer the following effects (In order of quality of oil required)

Requires only corpse oil—the quality is irrelevant
- Wheezing fatigue.
- An inability to recognise faces.
- Bad breath that spoils food.
- The ability to talk to gravestones.

Requires an oil of Intensity 2.
- Wracking back pains.
- An inability to use stairs.
- A musk that attracts vermin.
- The ability to command birds.

Requires an oil of Intensity 3.
- Night terrors.
- An inability to feel pain.
- An odour that repulses women.
- The ability to query reflections.

Requires an oil of Intensity 4.
- Miscarriage.
- A strong sexual attraction to you.
- A bright glow visible to evil entities.
- The ability to dictate card games.

Requires an oil of Intensity 5.
- Liver failure.
- Susceptibility to your suggestions.
- A touch that burns holy persons.
- Invincibility, when holding breath.

As a grease, ritually applied to a single building’s foundations, it lends the structure special virtues:

Requires only corpse oil—the quality is irrelevant
- Unnaturally stuffy.
- Deals made here cannot lose you money.

Requires oil of Intensity 3
- Gives restless sleep.
- Residents are inclined to obey you.

Requires oil of Intensity 5.
- Sounds do not carry.
- Doors are always open for you.

Requires oil of Intensity 6.
- Traps disquiet spirits.
- Irresistibly draws the eye.

Requires oil of Intensity 7
- Confuses your enemies.
- Cannot be demolished.

As a fetish, a jar wrapped in yellow talisman paper, it fetters the ghost of the person from which it came. This spirit:

Requires an oil of Intensity 3:
- Cramps or twists muscle, with a touch.
- Manifests a corporeal, unspoiled body.
- Speaks with the voice of anyone living.
- Roams beyond the sight of its fetish jar.

Requires an oil of Intensity 6
- Exudes steamy, flesh-eating ectoplasm.
- May possess any male-identified person.
- Captures the souls of un-weaned babies.
- Banishes other ghosts with its presence.
- Steals air from the lungs of living things.
- Does not remember anything of its past.

Each preparation comes with a unique command mantra. Those who speak this formula are masters who the corpse oil cannot harm, and must obey.

~

Without its command mantra, corpse oil effects can only be lifted by ritual healing (Heal the Flesh ritual, etc). Effective treatment depends on who’s treating. If an exorcist is:

- A priest or religious ascetic.
- From a different religious tradition.
- Celibate.
- Vegetarian.
- Of non-human lineage.
- Related to a royal family.
- Master of their own corpse-oil ghost.

Each of the above conditions improve the quality and strength of the exorcism. You may disrupt one corpse-oil effect per condition met.

If the exorcism’s total number of conditions exceeds the corpse oil’s total quality, the substance is destroyed. If not, the corpse oil’s effects return after C10 (that is pick a card 1-10) days.
-
-
-

Donate to the Demon City Kickstarter here

The Glistening Chamber Codex (or The Nyctythatic Text)

The earliest fragments containing any element of the text appear in Chalcolithic-era Sumeria in cuneiform script. It has been convincingly argued that they are not Sumerian in origin, showing a certain rigidity of grammar suggesting metaphors too-literally translated from older sources.  Even in this earliest incarnation the text references the “narrow tower banded in red higher than all the city” (alu) under the domed roof of whose “highest room” (itima) sits the “glistening” heresiarch by whom the text was commissioned, as well as calculations and (accurate) astronomical observations relevant to the system of “chambers” which forms the text’s core. In some versions the author describes their work as both “counting the city” and in others as “counting the gods”.

Later Assyrian sources are extremely similar, as are Babylonian fragments—though the latter describe the work as “counting the roads” and “counting the prisoners”. There is some evidence of the Babylonian text having been politicized. A version found in Beth Nuhadra refers to the work being commissioned by “a lord in a chamber” with “eyes that speak and this mouth is light”.

A Chinese oracular text of the Spring and Autumn Period (ruthlessly suppressed by the Zhou dynasty) known as the “Court of the Red Marquess” or “Palace of Folding Rooms” is mathematically similar to all of these versions in many respects, though some of the astronomical data appears to contain bodies not yet identified.

The first reference to the necessity of “dividing” or “disordering the chambers” appears in the works of an unnamed Ionian geometer of the 5th century BCE. Modern scholarship is unsure whether the suggestion that dividing the chapters of the “concentric text” one from the next into an “anti-text” is a serious philosophical suggestion or ironic in the manner of Xenophanes’ satires of Pythagoras around the same time.

A papyrus with related formulae distributed around the late first century in a mixture of Coptic and Demotic Egyptian refers to “Sixty Devices and Twelve Plagues Yet Unnamed” (Thirteen in one version). Like many texts of this period it is alleged to be a copy or fragment of the so-called “Book of Thoth”. Some scholars have claimed the Library of Alexandria was burned specifically to destroy it.

The actual Glistening Chamber Codex appears in the historical record thereafter: 12.5 inches tall, 8.4 inches wide, bound in an unidentified leather and written on goat(?)skin parchment, purporting to be a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a text discovered in “The script of Canaanites” (probably Hebrew). By all accounts it was, despite clear evidence of handling and travel, a textually undamaged and continuous mathematical and philosophical treatise describing a system of occult knowledge based on the concept of a series of 78 (“sixty and then six and six and six again”) “essential chambers” in which certain archetypal events and persons occur and, properly manipulated, can be expected to “swallow themselves” and reveal other “chambers of another city”. The most intriguing fact about the Codex was not appreciated until the 19th century, when the logosyllabic cuneiform of the aforementioned Sumerian fragments was translated and the texts were found to be nearly identical to the Codex.

The book was first found in the library of the astronomer and gambler Nyctythasis, condemned to death by dismemberment after the synod of Zaragoza in 380 as an addendum to the condemnation of Priscillianism. Sources within the church thereafter refer to the book (inevitably in hushed tones and only in private commnications) as “The Nyctythatic Text”.

Efforts to destroy the codex and the philosophy it espoused (or was alleged to espouse) had decidedly mixed success—throughout the esoteric writings of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, even in Christian texts, there are allusions to “a locus concentrycal”, “a chambred laborynth”, “chambres that go glisnynge a midde towres” and “blacker sterres incased wythyn the brycht sterres visyble” and 15th century grimoires such as the Synapothanumenon are considerably more explicit.

Certain temples in Uttar Pradesh constructed during India’s Pala period seem to be mathematically inconceivable without access to the Glistening Chamber formulae.

The book itself does not reappear in any records until the late 1400s when the Italian-suited Tarot de Marseille had become popular as a gaming deck, likely originating across the Mediterranean. At this point the Codex fell into the hands of the Augsburg merchant, occultist and manuscript collector Claus Spaun who immediately recognized the congruity of imagery and numerology between the system described in the Codex and the then-current version of the tarot playing-card deck, especially considering Classical commentary that the chambers should be “disordered” and “divided”. The Tarot was simply an attempt to place the Chambers in their proper order. Rather than publish his discoveries, Spaun elected to continue his researches in secret and the book itself passed into rumor for the next 500 years. Word of the conjunctions Spaun had found within esoteric circles eventually lead Antoine Court de Gébelin to publish his own theories of the occult meaning of the Tarot in 1781, although there is no evidence Gébelin ever had access to the Codex.

The original Codex was last seen in the hands of British linguist and architect Frederick Chester-Harping (a protege of Sir John Soane and Joseph Michael Gandy) who suffocated to death in 1873 while attempting to construct a building replicating the principles of the Codex in an unknown location. However, handmade copies have allegedly been found in the archives of industrialist and art collector J Paul Getty and in a public library in the abandoned coal-fire town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

From Demon City, which you can support here.

-

-

-

Zoomorph

with Demon City stats

These are hybrid creatures that, through necromancy or unknown science, have the characteristics of both a humans and an animal—hunched maggot-people, children with the heads of lizards, jaguarmen, etc.

Though there is nothing inherently wicked in their make-up, rejection due to the prejudices of humanity or the circumstances of their creation may lead them down furtive, dishonest or violent paths.

Design Notes:

Generally the animal part of a zoomorph expresses some emotional aspect of the human that civilization dampens: the tigerwoman is vicious, the man-toad is repulsive.

Zoomorphs created by science often exist in an ironic relationship to these traits—they may be quite ordinary people or animals underneath (and they are essentially like artificial life-forms, so see the Design Notes there for some useful info on how to run them). Zoomorphs created by magic or which are part of a hidden race that has been on Earth all along follow a more symbolic logic—the jackalmen will indeed be clever and skulking.

As with swarms, the Host should emphasize the sensory strangeness of the hybrid form as much as possible and not allow the players to become comfortable with the creatures as simply a fantasy-style “other race”—zoomorphs are closer to the sources of magic and disorder than the party (except perhaps The Problem PC), and their movements, ideas and speech will reflect it.

Typical Zoomorph

Calm: 2
Agility: As animal
Toughness: (Animal’s Toughness divided by 2) + 2
Perception: As animal
Appeal: 0
Cash: 1
Knowledge: 2

Calm Check: 5+animal stat
Card: Often Strength (8) or The Hermit (9)

Special Abilities:

As animal, plus: hybrids with small animals may have natural abilities/characteristics which go unnoticed at their original size but become meaningful when scaled up—like an ant’s scissoring mandibles.

Examples:

Camazotz (the man-bats of meso-america)

Calm: 2
Agility: 4
Toughness: 4
Perception: 6
Appeal: 0
Cash: 1
Knowledge: 2

Calm Check: 9
Card: Strength (8), The Hermit (9)

Special Abilities:

Echolocation: Camazotz can “see” in the dark using echolocation (normally too high-pitched to hear).

Shriek: Standard attacks on everyone in hearing range at Intensity 4.

Flying

Claws: Cause damage and grapple in the same attack.


Maggot Women (a larva-like body with a human head)

Calm: 2
Agility: 1
Toughness: 2
Perception: 4
Appeal: 0
Cash: 1
Knowledge: 6

Calm Check: 7
Card: The Hermit (9)

Special Abilities:

Prophecy: Maggot women can read a target’s future by rubbing the target’s face across their belly—in addition to conveying any details of the future the Host can reasonably guess, choose 3 cards for the target and describe what each means. The numbers of the cards will be the first Throws to come up when they encounter the people, places or situations depicted. Once the situations are encountered, one of the cards will be given as a reward.

Donate to the Demon City patreon here

Those Who Crawl To A Godless Place

New demon, suitable for any game, with Demon City stats..

DEMONS OF THE SECOND ORDER

The Chagidel are Insect Demons—their goal is to obscure, becloud and misinform and to thereby inculcate misrule. Enormous compounded scrapyard hybrids of insect and human, shaped as if by an art movement holding a impatient hatred of all that is as intended as an indelible virtue.

They come always as advisors. They ensconce themselves in the offices of the mighty, when the low hirelings and janitors have gone, and whisper to them in shredded voices, promising wealth, counsel, and companionship. Their minds are laboratories of effective fallacy and convincing invention. Their goal is chaos in every discourse, and the elevation of the unworthy. To this end they will serve the wicked, they will slay the living, they will skulk, they will whisper strategems and secrets to those in high places.

They cannot acknowledge any fact that exposes a lie they have told, and to do so would destroy them—if they say a man is a thief and another confesses, they can say nothing, not even to deny it, for to do so would acknowledge it has been said and they would then be undone and fucked beyond measure.

Their true names have two parts of two syllables each, such as Or’qvi Ein-et. They can only be summoned by one who has acquired two gifts due to two separate lies told in two separate homes to two separate souls in the last two days and the summoning requires a sacrifice of twins exactly two years old with two separate blades made from two separate substances on a night when the planet under which they were born is at its maximum distance from the one which the necromancer was.

Demon City Stats

Calm: 9
Agility: 2-6 (see below)
Toughness: 8
Perception: 6
Appeal: 0
Cash: 5
Knowledge: 8

Calm Check: 8
Cards: King of Pentacles (10), King of Cups (10), The Tower (16), Two of Swords

Special abilities:

Demonic: Demons don’t need to breathe or digest, don’t age, and are immune to poison, etc. and cannot be mentally controlled with psionic abilities. Animals will avoid demons in any form. Explosives do not harm Chagidel but firearms do.

Sixth Sense: All demons are supersensitive to danger, hostile emotions and signs of past trauma or the supernatural.

Babel Effect: In the presence of Those Who Crawl (within 100’ and they can see the demon or it can see them), all earnest communication is distorted. To simulate this, Players can only announce their characters’ actions—not words—no questions, no clarifications can be voiced out loud. Players must whisper or write down anything they wish their character to say directly to the Host, and the Host then relays this to the other players, but must change two words. If the player violates this rule, their character mishears something (Host: invent something) and acts on it, and to enact this, the Host takes control of the Player’s character for one round. Players may talk normally only if announcing a specific nonverbal action their characters are taking.

Climbing: The Chagidel can climb across any surface at a normal speed.

Minions: Chagidel are served by insect Swarms—these most often appear near the scenes of crimes committed by the demon or its pawns in order to harass those who later investigate.

Invertebrate Parts: Those Who Crawl appear in a variety of hybrid invertebrate forms, their bodies can include maggot torsos, caterpillar limbs, antennae, insectile eyes, spider legs, leech faces, the wings of moths butterflies or flies, scorpion stings, etc. Their agility should be based on their appearance—a demon with a slug belly will probably be a 2, one with a flylike physiognomy could be a 6. If they have a sting or venom sacs, assume this attack does Massive Damage but can only be enacted after a successful grapple. Wormsilk or webs should have a strength of 6. Some also may be coordinated enough to enact attacks which effect 2 targets per round. Feel free to stat up anything you can envision.

(possibly) Vile Larva: Those Who Crawl are loathsomely fecund and are often summoned when pregnant with repulsive young. The first successful attack on a Chagidel that pierces the skin (interpret any successful attack that could do this as having done so) releases 1-10 misshapen spawn and 1-10 more emerge each round thereafter until a maximum of 10 emerge.

Chagidel Spawn

Calm: 1
Agility: 1
Toughness: 1
Perception: 1
Appeal: 0
Cash: 0
Knowledge: 0 (but born able to speak and knowing the names of anyone it meets)

Calm Check: 8

Note the spawn can climb and have invertebrate parts but have none of the Chagidel’s other special abilities.

Weaknesses:

The holy symbols of any faith causes a demon to make a Calm check or flee until they are out of sight. The intensity of the calm check is equal to the degree of fervor of whoever is wielding it (1-9). In the case of an incidentally encountered symbol (a glimpsed church steeple, for instance) the intensity is 2.

Touching a holy symbol, including holy water, does damage to a demon as an ordinary physical attack.

Speaking the true name of demon causes it great pain, and the creature must make a Calm Check against the speaker’s Calm each round to avoid obeying the attacker.

If Those Who Crawl lie and it is disproven, they cannot by any means acknowledge the fact that disproves it.

Donate to the Demon City Patreon here.

Creepy Repeaters

Looking at the use of language in horror.

This text was created by feeding in the entire script of the Silence of the Lambs film, removing every line that didn't include the word "Clarice", and rearranging them in order of length.

It makes a nice little treatise--or christmas tree--on how much Lecter loves to say her name (perhaps because you have to bear your teeth and bite the air just to say it)--and the uses he puts it to.

Clarice.

Hey, Clarice.

Brave Clarice.

Well, Clarice?

Goodbye, Clarice.

Clarice M Starling.

Hot damn, Clarice.

Not "just", Clarice.

Thank you, Clarice.

Good evening, Clarice.

Clarice M. Good morning.

You're very frank, Clarice.

Yes, he did. Clarice Starling.

I'll help you catch him, Clarice.

Clarice, phone. It's the guru.

Where were you going, Clarice?

What became of your lamb, Clarice?

First principles, Clarice. Simplicity.

No. It is your turn to tell me, Clarice.

I'm Clarice Starling. I'm with the FBl.

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice.

And how do we begin to covet, Clarice?

Our Billy wasn't born a criminal, Clarice.

That was an especially nice touch, Clarice.

How did you feel when you saw him, Clarice?

Look deep within yourself, Clarice Starling.

What did you see, Clarice? What did you see?

Clarice. They're waiting for you. Watch your step.

Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice?

I've been in this room for eight years now, Clarice.

Yes or no, Clarice? Poor little Catherine is waiting.

If I help you, Clarice, it will be "turns" with us too.

Why, Clarice? Did the rancher make you perform fellatio?

Good morning. Dr Lecter, my name is Clarice Starling.

Oh, Clarice, your problem is you need to get more fun out of life.

I don't imagine the answer is on those second-rate shoes, Clarice.

I've waited, Clarice, but how long can you and old Jackie Boy wait?

Nice to meet you, Clarice. You can hang your coat up there if you like.

Clarice Starling and that awful Jack Crawford have wasted far too much time.

Clarice, doesn't this random scattering of sites seem desperately random, like the elaborations of a bad liar?

Below is a very condensed but surprisingly coherent remix of Lovecraft's original Call of Cthulhu story created by removing every sentence that doesn't have the word "Cthulhu" in it. The overall effect is to get rid of almost everything ordinary or dull in the story and reveal a very effective imagism at the core of the writing. Lovecraft seemed to not want to waste his invented word on any merely scene-shifty sentence.



Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.

This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway.

 He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.

Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.

From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu.

There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration.

I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note.

They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth.

These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs.

What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of.

Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency.

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters.

Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land.

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young.

The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him.

The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.

After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

d10 Awful Things To Say When Something Bad Happens To Their Skin

A lot of horror is just in how you say it.

1, It darkens and curls off like a leaf in a fire, batwing-shaped

2, It begins to drag and strip away in peals. like when tissue paper gets wet

3, It explodes in small, filthy yellowed bubbles that sag in on themselves instead of pop

4, It begins to run and then drip the way plastic melts, hanging in long hanging drops

5, It turn drier and tighter, ripping like paper showing red underneath

6, The veins and arteries in your arm pulse and writhe with something that isn't your blood

7, It's as if you're wrapped in some synthetic fabric that doesn't breathe but there's nothing there

8, A meniscus forms, like an algae, it feels like someone else's skin all around yours

9, There's a hot and cold like a needle or a staple's punched in and then dragged around your neck muscle while still anchored

10. You know, cherry pie filling? It feels like that, warm, and the cherries are made of saliva
-
-
-

What Really Happens At The Library

Part of writing Demon City is digging in to the tropes of investigation-based games and getting at the juicy gameable meat within--often with the help of people who know the worlds involved better than me.

Richard G, an expert on real life Going To Do Research wrote most of this for the game, I just edited it a bit and changed a sentence here and there...

Things To Know About Research 

Unless they’re right there in a library or the embezzler’s office, that initial Research Throw just means looking on the Internet. When that fails, you should go “Ok, nothing’s coming up on the Internet immediately. Do you want to try digging a little deeper?”

Digging deeper can involve a few different things:

-Have a Contact try it.

-Spend more time (maybe a week?—search variant spellings, leave requests on some forums, etc).

-Go to an archive.

…the third is the most exhausting, gameable, and has the greatest chance of success. Only 5% of archived information is even on the Internet—feel free to set Research challenges that simply can’t be done any other way (feel free to tell the player), and what is archived is often eccentrically indexed by barely-overlapping generations of underpaid staffers and unpaid volunteers into obsolete, proprietary paper and computer filing systems.

If you know a little about how archives work you can do two things: add some roleplaying color to an investigation that fleshes out your Demon City, and, once in a while, have an adventure about getting to the archive or (shudder) the depot before someone else does.

Archives

Storage formats get old and/or go out of fashion. Microfilm, fiche, photographic slides of unusual sizes, glass plate negatives. Photo negatives and prints are kept in deep freeze storage – you have to order them 48 hours ahead to warm up, and the archivist will want to know which photos beforehand because they can only be warmed up so many times. And you won’t know which photos ahead of time because nobody describes photos in the metadata.

Materials that are hard to scan/photograph because they’re big (blueprints) or fragile or mildewed or reflective. Attempts to digitize materials that failed to capture the important details (microfilms can usually be scanned but only in 1-bit colour (like a fax) –so you can see the data but can’t record it, except with a camera pointed at the preview screen.

Who cares? It’s all old stuff. We are concerned with the new.

Well, most infrastructure is old - buildings average 20-50 years, even if the computer system inside them is new, so if you want to know about the plumbing or air vents, that’s not online. Roads, foundations, geological surveys, city plans, interstate highway plans, birth and medical and education records – it’s all more than 20 years old and first recorded in systems that were antiquated then.

Requesting these things from the staff takes forever or charm or both. After that, the main challenge is that you might have to be a little stealthy about photographing the documents. Or the fact they might not be there. Then you have to go to the depot.

The Depot

There are the open stacks – that’s where the 5% that’s been digitized is kept. Then there are the closed stacks, which you can get into by charming the librarian. That has the stuff the chief archivist keeps on hand. Then there’s the depot.

The depot isn’t anywhere near the archive’s main building. It’s in an industrial wasteland where the buildings are cheap and truck access is bumpy but not crowded. Or it’s on a rented corner of the Navy yards, or “temporarily” housed on barges.

The depot is supposed to be double-sealed from the outside world – that’s supposed to mean a building inside a building, with its own electrical and heating and humidity control system and ideally slight positive pressure compared with the outside. In fact that kind of treatment is usually reserved for one room – the rest of the depot is a damp, leaky, badly lit concrete building with wire racks and cages where the artifacts are piled high on an organizational scheme known only to one person and their short-lived acolytes. You’re not supposed to be let into the depot unless you have special clearance – from the institution, possibly from the military, depending on where it’s located. Sometimes an archivist can let you in, sometimes clearance takes months to arrive.

All the doors in the depot auto-close (fire regulations – to keep the stuff inside safe, not you the visitor). All the lights auto shut-off after 3 minutes. The depot guy (or, less often, depot lady) carries a flashlight. Air conditioning units are loud. Leak locations are known and avoided.

If the depot crank gets into it, they’ll start finding stuff on their own to show you. You will learn stuff about them and the institution that makes it hard to work with either.

If you ever need to steal anything from the depot, request stuff that’s in the same cage or stored behind it. Chances are, the whole cage will be trucked out for the one item, so it’s not the depot crank’s fault if the other stuff in there gets damaged. The truck has no security beside obscurity.

Where else?

Maybe you’ve done all that and the thing just can’t be found. Maybe someone already stole it, suppressed it, or more likely just misfiled it. Maybe it’s actually on public display in the museum but nobody knew that.

All is not yet lost: The old, disgruntled archivist who nobody listens to will tell you to look in financial or insurance records. It’s amazing how much is reproduced in the insurance company’s archives.

Each department of a big institution keeps own records, often double-entered and cross-indexed with head office, so head office’s copy may be firewalled/redacted, but plumbing's might not be.

People hide things in ancestry records. Like, literally in the archive box. Their own notes, books belonging to the ancestor. If you go to the town where they grew up, you might find their diary, unindexed, with the immunization forms and diplomas.

Finally, quid pro quo works. Gifts are welcome, time spent chatting is maybe more so and if you can remember their grandkids’ names, less suspicious. Archivists and curators don’t have enough time to do a better job or know their archives better - they will ask you to share your research and photos, because you’re the only person to request that record in 50 or 100 years. Share what you can, because 6 months later they’ll find that other thing you needed and it’ll be your little secret.

-

-

-

Notes on the Occult

There are three things about the occult:

First, it’s about symbolism—but in an unusual way. The symbol does not just indicate the thing, it affects the thing. A regular symbol is like: the eagle represents America. If hurting the eagle hurt America, then you’d be moving toward the occult.

Second, while the system of symbols is (this is the literally meaning of the name) hidden—it is often hidden in plain sight. This is perhaps most purely expressed in the sentence from Twin Peaks “The owls are not what they seem”. The occult indicates a series of hidden connections between seemingly mundane things—it doesn’t just involve esoteric words and phrases, it uses ordinary words and phrases as if they had a significance we don’t give them.

It is, in this way, simply a parallel alternative to scientific explanations. Science claims that a pencil lead and a diamond have a secret connection (they are both carbon), the occult merely claims a different correspondence: this triangular window over here has a hidden connection to that man’s eye over there. Once the system of connections is understood, the whole world looks different: the investigator is living in a world full of levers to push and knobs to twist. 

Third, the system of symbols is old. It has been hidden (occulted) for a long time. In order to charge, say, an inverted triangle with occult flavor you don’t have to immediately give it a sinister meaning—just give it a meaning that goes back to ancient Babylon.

-

-

-

The Horror Sandbox

Shock

Horror obviously involves fear, but many genres involve fear. At the core of the horror genre is to reach an intense level of fear using shock.

Shock is an important part of horror and I don't mean that in a vague way—I mean specifically being surprised about something and that something is bad is an important part of what defines the horror genre versus othergenres. In horror either the audience is shocked or the characters are or both.

If there's a criminal with a knife that's a crime thriller, if the audience knows that when they stab a person with the knife it's going to be gory or just terrifying in a way they can’t anticipate that's horror.

If a character is scared because there’s a werewolf that's fantasy if they’re scared because there's a werewolf and because they didn't know werewolves were a thing that's horror.

So in horror, it’s not just a bad thing is happening, someone is surprised at the bad thing happening.

Horror Vs Thriller and Fantasy and Horror-Fatigue

Crime thrillers and fantasy both posit a world where the raw material of the genre is common—just as a thriller reminds us there’s a knife in every kitchen, in fantasy, the supernatural is everywhere.

In horror, the fact shock (a species of surprise) is part of the genre can actually limit the protagonists. After they’ve seen a certain number of horrors, they are no longer shockable. Walter and Jesse can keep getting into sticky situations with armed gangsters each week on Breaking Bad and it’s a thriller every week, Conan can keep fighting wizards and it’s fantasy every month, but you’ll notice the X-Files or Hellboy stop feeling like horror at a certain point, despite the presence of horror elements. This is one reason American Horror Story changes its set up every season and why series’ about “Vampire hunters” or the like tend to feel more like fantasy or superhero stories than classic horror and why George RR Martin writes 7 books about the same people and Shirley Jackson doesn’t.

There is also the question of mystery: defeating a horror usually involves answering a lot of “Why?” questions—and once these are answered, a mythology develops (“Vampires fear holy water”) and it ceases to be mysterious. you climb more toward simple noir (without the supernatural) or fantasy (with it). 

The Extended Campaign

There are a few ways to deal with shock fatigue and loss of mystery in an extended campaign:

-Go full gore: Make the mortality rate so high that new characters are a near-constant presence, and total party kills are frequent. You have to have a certain kind of player for this.

-Live with it: Hellboy is a fine comic, even if Hellboy isn’t usually scared and neither is anyone else. Allow your characters to adopt the jaded mien of seasoned monsterfinders. 

-Ascending scale of supernaturalness: This requires some planning and discipline on the GM’s part. The first adventure is about a hitman, the second is about a serial killer, the third is about a necromancer, the fourth about a demon, the fifth is about Satan, the sixth is about the Apocalypse. The key is each threat is not only bigger than the last, but, more subtly—breaks the rules of “normal” more fully.

-All the horrors have a common source: Again, this requires planning and discipline. In this scheme, the idea is that the investigators eventually find that all the horrors are part of one larger horror, like the Ascending Scale the horrors get worse, but the idea is the surprise comes from how many new things the larger horror is capable of. Like in the story Call of Cthulhu, the titular monster is responsible for a psychic’s nightmare, for an artifact, for a cult ceremony, and then the creature appears itself. 

The Horror Sandbox

A sandbox is a kind of game defined by two characteristics: first: players can, to some degree, pick their objectives and second: the world responds somewhat like a real one would to their actions, possibly on a very large scale.

The classic sandbox is a fantasy game trope: a great map is spread out, with tantalizing rumors about treasure and dangers in various places and the players decide which sound fun—exploring any one of these options creates a cascade of consequences, changing the world and then the players need to decide again what to do in this changed world. The appeal of the sandbox is it offers a great deal of player choice, and unpredicted player actions have unpredictable consequences.

It’s relatively unusual to have a pure sandbox in a horror game, partially because having multiple objectives at once (a werewolf in Warsaw, a ghoul in Ghana) can lead to horror fatigue or a loss of a sense of mystery, but even moreso because an investigation scenario requires a GM to essentially give the PCs an absolutely existentially essential objective (solve the mystery or we all die) and then do a certain amount of work to make achieving that one objective interesting and full of interesting choices. If objectives are optional, they're not really horror. Horror is "Dracula must die" not "Dracula could die if you felt like it".

However, again, with discipline and planning, it is quite possible to make a horror sandbox if that kind of game interests you and your players. Essentially it just means taking the kind of choice presented in the Investigation as Dungeon and scaling up.

The way that most cleanly respects the horror and investigative genres is this:

1. There’s a conspiracy of some kind

2. Near the beginning of the sandbox campaign (or the sandbox phase of the campaign) the characters discover a more-or-less explicit list of separate conspirators.

3. (Unbeknownst to the investigators but likely suspected by the players) the conspirators each have some connection to a horror of their own. Or they are a horror.

4. The list of conspirators makes clear some interesting and at least slightly juicy fact about each conspirator: their neighborhood or city, their job, crimes they may be suspected of, etc.

5. The list also makes clear they are interconnected—exposing/killing/locating one will cause the others to change in some way or ways. Perhaps it is a cult and they all must sacrifice a creature on a given night—and if one doesn’t it is known that another must recruit a new member to take their place. Or perhaps it’s a smuggling organization, and getting rid of one link in the chain means operations will shift to somewhere else. Give the players as much information about these mechanisms as you can without spoiling a mystery you want them to solve—it will make the decision and planning more interesting for them.

6. Treat the investigation of any given conspirator as basically one adventure to design, but with one important additional emphasis: whatever happens to this conspirator affects the others in some interesting way.

7. Season to taste and serve.

--

-

HOW TO DO A CREEPY VOICE (also, last day of Ennie voting)

Don't breathe through your nose while talking.

Flatten your tongue.

Place the tip of your tongue about a half inch behind your upper teeth, try to touch your upper teeth on either side with the sides of your tongue.

Speak slowly

You want to get metal "vocal fry" (there are youtube videos) the idea is you make a continuous sound out of your throat and pull the muscle at the base of your tongue inward toward the back of the throat as much as you can.

Try not to use the whole range of movement of your mouth when you talk, stick to just moving your lips and the tip of your tongue. Try to keep your mouth relatively closed.

The overall idea is you are channeling a relatively loud sound through a relatively small opening.
-
-
-
Also, last day of Ennie voting:

For judges:

Rob Monroe
Sean McCoy
Reece Carter

and

A. Miles Davis (Anson Davis)

Best Adventure

Kiel is up with 'Blood in the Chocolate'

Best Electronic Book

Mike Evans is up with Hubris

Best Cartography

Jez  (Red & Pleasant Land) and James Grognardia are up for 'The Cursed Chateau'

Best Free Product

'Santa is Dead' by In Search Of Games, is up.

And Veins of the Earth by Scrap and Patrick (Maze of the Blue Medusa) Stuart is up for;

Best Monster/Adversary

Best Rules

Best Writing

and..

Product of the Year

Vote VoTE

Investigation-As-Dungeon

A lot of game masters have experience with dungeons but have trouble writing investigation or horror adventures--especially ones that aren't railroady--and very few pre-written commercial modules help with that.

Here's a way to write investigations and visualize how they work for yourself--it combines the idea of a Hunter/Hunted investigation set-up with the idea of the criminal conspiracy organizational charts cops use--(which Ken Hite calls a "conspiramid" in Night's Black Agents. This is a step or two more complex and concrete.).

It visualizes the possibilities in an investigation as a dungeon:

So, first, you have The Horror--this is the final boss, the supernatural or at least bizarre thing that is revealed after all the investigating is done. You probably already have in mind what that is. Imagine it as occupying a room in the center of a dungeon.

Around that you have the "Gatekeeper"--this is the NPC or the building or whatever that you encounter right before the final horror. This could be the crime boss who keeps the werewolf in his basement or the cultist wizard that summons Cthulhu or, yes, like Dana in Ghostbusters who brings forth Gozer.

The point of the Gatekeeper is they are a mundane front that, once encountered, triggers the appearance of the horror.

Picture the Gatekeeper as occupying a set of halls around the Horror. You can move through those walls when investigation reveals new information. Think of information as literally the key. You unlock the adjacent "room" with information.

Don't worry about those little rooms in the corners yet, they'll be explained in a second. They're an important difference between this and the simple conspiracy pyramid.

So outside the Gatekeeper's room we have other connecting rooms that the PCs have to get through before they have enough information to get to the boss. 

I put some examples: a pawn of the boss, their lawyer, etc. You can also move laterally, like investigating the boss' lawyer might lead the PCs to the sub-boss, etc. This is fine. The point is whatever they're doing be fun, not that it be efficient.

You can wrap the center in as many layers of these adjacent "buffers" as you want.

The outer layer of "buffers" are the first things the players can do when investigating the situation. Imagine the PCs beginning outside and moving inward. In this example, the players can interview the victim directly, search the crime scene, do research on the place where the crime took place (like in the library or on the web), or ask their contacts about it.

Different "entrances" lead to different parts of the conspiracy.

The outermost ring is the "room" where players start--discovering there is a crime to solve.

The orange spot in the lower right is some pizza cheese stuck on my scanner. It's not that important.

I haven't yet talked about those little boxes in the corners. These are kind of "secret rooms".

These are where the dangerous people and things associated with the crime lurk. They do two things:

A) They attack the investigators if they get stalled in their investigation. This keeps the game moving.

B) Their attack brings the investigators closer to the center of the investigation.

For more detail on how and why this works, check out Hunter/Hunted. This is the most important difference between this and a simple conspiracy pyramid.

Here's an example:

Our investigators start out having heard of the suspicious decapitation of Bunny Monrovia, cherished uncle.

 They begin to comb through the internet, looking for information about Bunny's work and possible enemies he might've made in the experimental entomology business.

They figure they'll interview Bunny's wife, Capybara Monrovia (victim), she tells them Bunny's best friend was Sweetwater Baize, a kindly fellow who helped Bunny out and always brought Jelly Bellies for the twins.

Sweetwater Baize warmly welcomes the PCs into his abode.

They can tell he's hiding something but don't manage to question Sweetwater's suspicious butler, much less sneak upstairs and find the hideous mantis creature that once was Sweetwater's sister or figure out anything much about Sweetwater.

Dinner seems to drag on, the GM is getting restless.

So out of the "attack" box the GM conjures the Mantis Cultists, who Sweetwater calls in to deal with these meddling kids. They strike hard...

...but not hard enough. The players defeat them, learning in the process that the mysterious butler was actually the head of the mantis cult.

The players can now confront him (the Gatekeeper) and he can unleash the hideous beast (The Horror).

To walk you through the analogy with a dungeon a little clearer, I made the actual investigation more complicated than it needed to be.

This "dungeon" is the same structure but a little simpler for a GM to write--it has 3 initial methods of investigation and only 3 kinds of buffers between the crime and the Gatekeeper.

To create a whole campaign, imagine this is the top view of a stepped pyramid seen from a helicopter--all you have to do is add more "steps" to the pyramid.

This investigation advice will be cleaned up and expanded for the Demon City project. To donate to it, go to the Demon City Patreon here.
-
-

d100 Ritual Killings

Sacrifice Details, for any awful game, roll d100

1, Multiple sacrifices, each must die as their father did

2, Murdered by exposure to terrible winds

3, Sealed in stone then dropped in the water

4, Wrapped in fine worm silk until suffocated

5, Wrapped in ancient skin and drowned

6, Burned alive by the sun

7, Scalded by lava or molten metal

8, Eaten by bacteria

9, Snake or vermin inserted into body, orifice sealed, eaten/poisoned from the inside

10, Force fed a cobra’s venom sac

11, Force fed 200 moth orchids

12, Buried alive 20’ down

13, Impaled on a steel spike

14, Impaled with a icicle of their own frozen tears

15, Decapitated with a knife of bone

16, Lungs removed with a knife of diamond

17, Tied with jade vines and eaten by eels

18, Thrown to crocodiles

19, Chained in iron and killed by a parent of twins

20, Strangled with an octopus tentacle

21, Dissolved in acid

22, Bandaged and embalmed, organs removed

23, Cut with silver wire

24, Held with pig leather and branded with pokers

25, Carved open with ram’s horn

26, Asphyxiated with jackal’s innards

27, Force-fed eyes until stomach ruptures

28, Blinded, then deafened, then silenced, then slain

29, Crushed beneath bodies

30, Torn by rabid animals

31, Drugged and consumed by pirahna

32, Given to panthers

33, Bound with own hair and stung by crawling things

34, Drawn and quartered by blind horses

35, Killed by those most trusted

36, Held down with coffin nails and eaten by vultures

37, Killed with a knife 900 years old and never used

38, Killed by poison from an untouched cup

39, Slain by lightning

40, Given a plague

41, Locked in an iron maiden

42, Skewered on a dagger that once killed a king

43, Killed in combat with another sacrifice

44, Driven mad and made to crawl

45, Punctured in 9 places

46, Stomach filled with black beetles

47, Skull crushed with a stone hammer

48, Cut in five pieces of equal weight

49, Covered in salt and pierced by stakes

50, Cannibalized by children of 10 years or less

51, Ripped open with volcanic glass

52, Sewn to functionless limbs

53, Pelted with rocks from above

54, Boiled in a vessel cast by a bastard

55, Crucified inverted, pierced with copper pins

56, Skin removed with a malachite scalpel

57, Hung with catgut

58, Caged and pierced from north, south, east and west

59, Sawn open with a weapon lined with tiger’s teeth

60, Sliced slowly with a razor used to cut seven men

61, Suffocation in ash

62, Fed the shards of cup from which only a virgin has sipped

63, Killed by a family member

64, Killed by their own hand

65, Buried underneath bleach-white items

66, Bled out from small cuts in the shape of sigils

67, Disemboweled with weapons of nickel

68, Throat cut wth the hooves of animals

69, Drowned on dry land with the waters of three oceans

70, Drowned in priests’ saliva

71, Drowned in mother’s blood

72, Drowned in mother's milk

73, Drowned in the purge fluid created when organs decay

74, Rent with fragments of a lovers’ skull

75, Neck pierced from eight directions with ebony

76, Taken apart a half-inch at a time

77, Drilled open from three directions at once

78, Killed unwittingly by a friend

79, Killed as the sun rises

80, Battered with a gemmed gloved

81, Killed in sleep

82, Multiple sacrifices, each kills the next

83, Three killed in one motion

84, Smothered in a funeral shroud

85, Kept alive in torture 9 days

86, Immersed in tar

87, Pushed from a tower

88, Set alight by sunlight focused through lenses

89, Immolated in a bonfire fueled by human fat

90, Throat stuffed with tongues

91, Exsanguinated by hundreds of leeches

92, Killed as a summoned thing emerges from its body

93, Sacrifice’s members delivered to four corners of the earth

94, Clawed by crows, called by the ceremony

95, Crippled then left to fend off hyenas or coyotes

96, Eviscerated at the point of erotic climax

97, Parietal lobe perforated by ancient bronze forks

98, Killed by shock

99, Killed by a weapon handled by 7 honest men

00, Stabbed and dropped in a black pit

Donate to the Demon City Patreon